In style with the rest of Pixel Towers it’s completely up to you how much and if you’d like to pay for the soundtrack. We might be biased but we think the soundtrack is easily worth some money. This is your chance to support good music in indie games!

Have a listen to soundtrack right here or click through to get to the Bandcamp page to purchase the track.

We’ve made a desktop version of Pixel Towers available for download. Please note that the desktop version does not support online highscores. But besides that it’s the exact same game.

You will need Java Runtime (from here) to run this succesfully on your desktop of choice (PC, Mac, Linux). If you have Java installed, simply download the zip file below, extract it to a folder and double click it to start the game. It’ll keep track of your highscores locally.

We’ve been busy finishing this one up over the weekend. And we’re proud of it. Pixel Towers merges classic one-button gameplay with lovely pixelart accompanied by retro chiptune music. The game is powered by Scoreloop to keep track of highscores.

We provide Pixel Towers completely free of charge. The game available is an uncrippled, fully-featured, no-ad version and you will never have to pay for Pixel Towers.

If you love Pixel Towers and wish to support us, you have the option of purchasing the “Cookies & Beer” version of Pixel Towers. By purchasing the “Cookies & Beer” version you will allow us to enjoy a few “Cookies & Beers” during the development of our next game 🙂 I mean, who doesn’t like Cookies & Beer?!

Last weekend I took part in Ludum Dare once again. I ended up creating a short little experimental storytelling game called “The Invention of Colour”. The entire thing (art, code, music) was created in under 48 hours.

Walking into the competition I had one goal in mind: Create something that has a dense, expressive mood and portraits a distinct character to the player. I wanted the player to walk away from the game feeling like he actually got to know the main character’s emotional world by just listening to him for 2 minutes.

I personally find the transfer of emotional concepts to be one of the most challenging for a game designer. Quite often realism does not translate to something that’s emotionally impacting. The current trend seems to be toward hyper-realism. But to be honest I was a lot more emotionally involved in some of the classic games of the 8bit & 16bit era. There’s a huge potential when we leave gaps for the player to imagine things.

What is your experience with this? How can we as game designers engage players more on an emotional level? Would love to hear your thoughts.

For our animated models in Awaken we decided to go with md2. Even though it is a somewhat antiqued format (hello Quake) it seems to fit our purposes best since it doesn’t put much drain on the poor mobile CPU. Who knows we might still end up having to go down the vertex skinning route..

We spent way too much time trying to find a way to export the models from 3ds Studio Max to md2. Turns out it is a little bit more tricky than first expected. We searched the internet for exporters / plugins and there’s really not much around. There’s one commercial plugin (QTip) and a few really old scripts.

Finally we found a script posted by a kind user somewhere in a forum which seemed up to date. We ended up having to modify the original script slightly to work with the libgdx workflow better. So all the glory & praise goes to the original authors, we just made the tiniest changes!

Either way, we thought we’d save you the time and trouble to find a script if you’re in a similar position 🙂 Read below to get all the details and instructions.

Been a while since the last update. Lots and lots of stuff coming to Awaken soon. Our main focus is currently on the combat system. Hopefully we will be able to let you kill some monsters in the next few weeks and gather some much needed feedback on combat.

In the meantime we got a small update to play around with. We’ve fixed pretty much all bugs you guys reported. Additionally we’ve been playing around with the lighting and the new version is a lot more atmospheric because of it.

Finally some more Dungeon Crawler news! We’ve been working hard to get a first playable version of Awaken (our dungeon crawler) out into the wild. And today we’re ready to let you have a play with it. Please note: This version is not a finished game. Not even close to it. Rather it is a technical demo of our dungeon generator and some of the basic game mechanics. All you can do (for now) is to get lost in the depths of the dungeons. There’s a total of 5 levels for now and the dungeons get larger the further down you go. But we think it’s fun already anyway! 🙂

Our plan is to continually add features over the next few months until it’s mature enough for a proper release. So if you’re interested in the game, make sure you check back regularly to get the latest version.